Panda Bear: The Wanderer

For a decade, Noah Lennox has lived within the shimmer and shadow of Lisbon. Philip Sherburne travels to the Portuguese capital to see how its unique character has shaped the life and work of the artist best known as Panda Bear.

All photos shot on location in and around Lisbon, Portugal by Tonje Thilesen

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The sun casts a blanket of stripes over the grass as Noah Lennox leads a small delegation through the botanical gardens in Lisbon's Príncipe Real neighborhood. The air, damp from last night's rain, smells sweet—fig trees, maybe, or loquats. Lennox, in a denim jacket adorned with an Eye of Horus print, doesn't lead the way so much as amble along, with the rest of us—a photographer, her assistant, and me—following gamely in his wake. Nobody talks much. It's peaceful in here, a proper urban oasis. Not that the city itself, with its blue and green tiles, cobblestoned streets, and pastries (my God, its pastries), particularly feels like a thing that needs escaping.

As the path winds around a small pond, Lennox scuffs his way through the grass and stands against a bamboo thicket at the behest of the photographer. He kicks aside an errant nogueira—a walnut, covered in a yellow-green casing, like a big, spongy lime—and then changes his mind. Stooping over, he gathers up three of them in his hands, straightens up, and tosses them into the air in quick succession, tracing a circle where the sun cuts the shadows into ribbons.

Panda Bear is juggling for us.

He's pretty good at it, too, complete with a repertoire of tricks. Well, one trick—under-the-leg—that he executes with a lanky sense of ease. He is every bit the picture of a born performer, which is ironic, because the day before, he told me that he doesn't particularly like performing.

With the exception of the addicts shooting up in the alley across the street, there is nothing rock'n'roll about Noah Lennox's home, a second-floor apartment in a stately building near the top of one of Lisbon's many hills. He pauses at the doorstep, looking down the narrow street: Lined with pink and yellow stucco, daubed in a tangle of graffiti, it feels like a channel carved for the express purpose of funneling light from the waterfront. "This is one of my favorite views," he says.

The 36-year-old musician lives here with his wife, the fashion designer Fernanda Pereira, and their two kids: a daughter, 9, and a son, 4. There are some toys scattered about the living room, and an empty cardboard box that the kids have turned into a racecar, with pillows for seats. Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby sits atop the stereo.

The walls must be 18 inches thick—an architectural requirement imposed after a devastating earthquake in 1755 that leveled much of the city—which gives the windowsills the look and feel of a concrete bunker. Still, the prevailing vibe inside is cozy. Between the wooden floorboards, interconnecting rooms, and 12-foot ceilings, it might have the best feng shui of any home I've ever been in.

Prepping a pot of coffee, Lennox tells me, "I like big empty spaces—things that aren't visually cluttered." That's surprising, given the ecstatic excess of the music he makes as Panda Bear, with its umpteen layers of vocals and dense thickets of rhythm.

Through his solo work and as a member of Animal Collective, he is a representative of that amorphous thing we call American indie at its most ambitious. Yet Lennox is far removed from anything you might call the American indie rock scene; in fact, he hasn't lived in America for a decade.

So I've come to Lisbon to see what it is about this city that has nurtured such a singular voice and career. The day I arrive, we talk about life overseas; like him, I grew up in the States, but I've lived in Barcelona for almost 10 years; like him, I'm married to a local. I want to know what it’s like to have kids who are natives in the place where you are a foreigner.

"You're an alien," he says, without rancor or remorse. "I sort of like being an alien. It's OK with me. Do you get weird looks? Do people notice you? Are you reminded that you're an alien on a daily basis?"

These are questions, but he also makes them sound a little like points of pride.

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The first day we meet, in the middle of November, it's pouring down rain. We're sitting in a glassed-in restaurant in O Jardim do Príncipe Real, a park just a few blocks from Lennox’s house. Nursing green tea, he's talking about his kids. Specifically, the fact that neither of them are into music or sports, which is a little weird, since those are the two main things that motivate him, besides family.

"They’re definitely not into my music," he says. "I tried. My son seems to be curious about it, at least. My daughter likes stuff she hears on the radio, but she gets turned off by anything I do. I think she's embarrassed by it.” He says that when he played her “Mr Noah”, the first single from his new album Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, she walked out of the room after 10 seconds, indignant over a lyric about “a dog getting bit.”

The lyrics to "Mr Noah" are quintessentially Panda Bear—cryptic, densely imagistic, ambiguously druggy, simultaneously self-deprecatory and ecstatic. But the most interesting thing about the song's presentation, at least on a lyric sheet, might be the words "wolf," "bear," and "eagle" that scroll vertically to the left of each stanza, a kind of quasi-acrostic.

"I was talking to this healer witch person who lives down the river a little bit," he says. "And she was like, 'You have three spirit animals. The first is a wolf. The second is a bear. And the third is an eagle.' So I set up the song according to that, and I tried to find bits of myself that I thought fit into that template."

Because I’m human—and because I remember Lennox addressing therapy on his song "Take Pills", which is about getting off antidepressants—I prod him a bit about this “healer witch person.”

Did she have a specific...

"... regimen?" Lennox finishes for me. "Sort of. It was periods of meditation, breathing—nothing really kooky. It's good to be reminded about that stuff."

Was it helpful?

"When you're trying to feel better, just going to talk to somebody—just being active at all—helps. Anything that's not just sitting still is helpful."

The next day, while Lennox is being photographed in his kitchen, I catch sight of a shot of him on the wall, in which he's wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with howling wolves. "I've had that sweatshirt forever,” he says later on. “That's what I was wearing when I met Fern. I still wear it all the time."

In 2003, Lisbon was the last stop on a European tour for Lennox and his Animal Collective bandmate Dave Portner, aka Avey Tare. It was their first visit to the city, and they'd planned to stay for a few extra days. The night after their gig, Lennox went to see the Finnish house producer Luomo play, and after that, he fell in with a group of strangers. He was wearing the wolf sweatshirt—it might've even been the icebreaker.

This story will probably sound familiar to anyone of a certain age and inclination who has washed up in a foreign city for a few days: piling into someone's car; a thwarted nightclub adventure; an improvised plan B in someone else's living room. "I spent the next couple of days with them, and met Fern, and it snowballed," Lennox says.

Eight months later, he packed a single bag and quit New York for Lisbon. "It seems like a rash decision now, but I can be like that, not really thinking of consequences. Like, 'This is the right thing to do. I'm gonna do that.'"

He had been living in Lisbon for about a year when he and Fern got hitched; it wasn't quite two years since they had first met. "We got dressed up and her family was there,” he tells me. “We had to go up to the town where she's from, signed the papers, city hall, that kind of deal. But I didn't have family or friends there. They were all pretty upset at me."

Did you at least tell anyone you were getting married—your mother? Your bandmates?

"No," he says, looking down. "I can be aloof in a really bad way about stuff like that—not aware of the etiquette of things. I feel like I'm a bit idiotic socially, I guess."

"I feel like the point of social media is to reveal more of your life to other people, and my instinct is to go the opposite way."

An important thing to know about Noah Lennox is that he is a private person—"intensely," as he tells me one afternoon. Six years ago, he made the decision to commit what he calls "Internet suicide": "I killed the Facebook. I have a Twitter, but only to read other people's tweets; management people do social media stuff for me. It's not really my bag. I feel like the point is to reveal more of your life to other people, and my instinct is to go the opposite way."

At one point, I ask him why he's being forthcoming with me. "I don't like to talk about it, but if you ask me I'll tell you," he says, looking me in the eye. "I don't want to bring it up in conversation, but I'm not going to lie to you."

Another, and maybe more important, thing to know about Noah Lennox is that he is not a bummer dude.

At one point, he invites me up to his studio just to listen to music. His screensaver is toggling through all the album covers in his iTunes library when we sit down, and we are momentarily transfixed. "So cool," he says. "So cheesy, though." We watch the covers flip past, like tiles in an old airport arrivals board: There’s Detroit techno producer Omar-S, Sade’s Love Deluxe, Norwegian disco prankster Todd Terje, a Sierra Leone musician with an album called Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana, plus Oasis and Deadmau5 (one early Grim Reaper demo was actually dubbed "Deadmaus Thing")—even The Jungle Book soundtrack, which turns out to be a favorite of his.

You also might never guess Lennox's reticence from his own music, which is bright and expansive and, sonically speaking, bursting with technicolor optimism. (Ironically, Lennox is colorblind. Green, blue, grey, certain purples—in his eyes, they have all become untethered from their corners of the spectrum and swim together in an uncertain blur.) It's only once you begin parsing the lyrics that it becomes clear how the music rides the line between joy and doubt, ecstasy and dismay, like a surfer navigating the seam between perfect curl and foam.

On his 2007 solo breakout Person Pitch, “Bros” had him pleading with his friends back home for space and understanding. Then, four years later, on Tomboy's "Friendship Bracelet", he came to grips with his own distance, noting, "Without notice, I've become someone who's out of reach." On that same album, the father of two went straight to the heart of the question that kept him up at night: "What to do when the things/ That I want don't allow/ For the handful of mouths/ That I'm trying to feed?"

"There was a lot of anxiety about that kind of stuff then," he says now. "And a lot of that was about working, being a musician, and living a very public career, while being a very private person."

The tension between doubt and joy is more pronounced than ever on the new album. On "Boys Latin", for instance, he sings of dark clouds descending, but the melody is a feather in an updraft, his voice a prism kissed by light.

But even when they’re doing some heavy lifting, Lennox's lyrics are imbued with a refreshing lightness of spirit, and even mischievousness. Take "Tropic of Cancer", a song from the new record that's clearly about his father, who died of brain cancer in 2002—except that it's a world away from the inchoate mourning of his 2004 album, Young Prayer, which was written as a kind of reckoning after the fact.

"Overall, that song is about sympathy for disease," he says, "trying to forgive disease, seeing it as just another thing in the universe that's trying to survive." The tone of the track is the opposite of maudlin, its lilting harp and doo-wop vocals just a hair's breadth from kitsch. "I almost feel like I should have a glass of cognac in my hand when I'm singing it," he deadpans, launching into a lounge singer's melancholy croon.

Lennox was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1978, but his family moved to a leafy section of Baltimore when he was 3. His father was a surgeon; his mother danced ballet, and still does.

As a child, Lennox gravitated towards drawing; in high school, he played basketball, until music took over his life. In addition to taking piano lessons, he also joined a choir. "The sound of collections of voices singing separate parts in unison is really powerful to me,” he says.

As he was on the cusp of teenagedom, his parents bought a Korg 01/W, a workstation synthesizer with a 16-channel sequencer and drum machine. "They bought it for the family, but I was the only one that used it a lot," Lennox says. "You would save stuff onto these floppy discs, and one time my brother accidentally erased a couple of them, and I was so pissed."

He moved up to Boston for college, where he wrote and recorded songs on a Tascam Portastudio four-track cassette recorder and fantasized about having a record—complete with barcode, he emphasizes—in the racks at local institution Newbury Comics. “I'm definitely a dreamer,” he chuckles, “but a very conservative dreamer.”

In 2000, after dropping out of college, Lennox moved in with Portner in New York. While Animal Collective were developing their shared musical language, Lennox and Portner got jobs at East Village record store Other Music, where Lennox worked in the upstairs office, doing mail order and data entry.

"I was too socially awkward to talk to customers," he continues. "There was one time when they were short-staffed, and I had to work on the floor. But five minutes into it, I was getting yelled at, like, 'C'mon, we're trying to hustle here!'" His voice drops to a whisper, the caricature of a petulant teenager. "It sucked."

"Noah's self-characterization is not totally off," Josh Madell, Other Music's owner, confirms. "But he was always funny and involved with all of his co-workers. He used to sit at his desk all day cracking jokes and singing along to records—Noah does a dead-on Axl Rose."

Hanging around Lennox, it soon becomes clear that music comes out of him as naturally as air. Once or twice, while behind the wheel of a car or walking down the street, he starts singing—not quite out loud but not exactly under his breath, either. When this happens, I feel like a birdwatcher in the right place at the right time. I don't say anything. I don’t want to break the spell.

"Noah's music is actually a really good indicator of his personality, too," Madell continues. "He is so sweet-natured, caring, and sensitive. But on the other hand, he’s always existed on his own plane; he could be dutifully filing LPs while the store burned to the ground."

Listen to the opening notes of Grim Reaper’s "Sequential Circuits" as the sun rises over Lisbon's hills—the tiled facades throwing off dazzling light—and you kind of get it. Not to fall prey to pathetic fallacy, but once you've been here, you can hear the city in Lennox’s music, though there are no direct references to the native fado that I heard in the taxi from the airport, nor to the Angolan-Portuguese kuduro that has drawn so much recent acclaim. But the light and the air and the space of Lisbon and its surroundings—its seismic history and colonial failures, its broken grey concrete and gleaming azulejo, its ghastly economy and its breathtaking coastline, its junkies and its tourists—inform the shape of Panda Bear's music; they permeate its textures and dictate the wavelength of its frequencies.

Taking advantage of the sudden appearance of the sun, Lennox decides to drive out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Walking to his parking garage, we come across a skinny woman in her 30s, a little worse for the wear, guiding cars into empty parking spots. I have seen her, and several others like her, on most of my trips up this block; in a depressed economy like Portugal's, this is what passes for work for many people. Greeting her in Portuguese, Lennox digs in his pocket and hands her some coins.

Inside his Volkswagen, he plugs his phone into the car stereo, and we go bouncing over the city's hills accompanied by the mournful foghorn bleats of dark UK producer Andy Stott. The garish Amoreiras Towers loom absurdly over the city, as though a chunk of skyline had fallen out of The Fifth Element and landed on top of Lisbon. "So gnarly," says Lennox, laughing. "It's like a really ugly dog—you kind of love it despite its ugliness."

We cross an enormous bridge that looks like the Golden Gate, and then it's all short pines and eucalyptus; the single-family houses have peaked roofs and chimneys. It's hard to believe the city is just minutes behind us.

Lennox and his family used to live on this side of the river, in a house in a gated community that was way too expensive, although it did have a fireplace. They had come seeking peace and quiet, and they found too much of it, eventually heading back to the hustle of Bairro Alto and Príncipe Real.

Cresting a bluff, the trees change again—suddenly they're shorter and scrubbier, bent over into the wind. And then there's the ocean, sooner than you'd expected to see it. Suddenly all those seagull sounds on Tomboy’s "Alsatian Darn" make more sense, as do all the gradations of light in Panda Bear's music, and the way his vocals seem to float on the wind.

Down at the bottom of the bluffs, a sign says "Praia do Americano"—Beach of the American—and we park and stroll down the sandy road, dodging massive puddles. Most of the snack bars are closed for the off-season; many of the houses are boarded up or falling down.

"This is the ultimate big empty space," he says, laughing. A few surfers splash out in the waves; a pack of wild dogs runs between the dunes. The sand is littered with razor clam shells, and every few paces there's a jellyfish corpse, bigger than an outstretched hand, rubbery and translucent blue.

"The surfers here aren't very good," he says, watching them flail in the choppy water. "It always makes me feel better to see crappy surfers, like, 'I could do that.'"

He takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his khakis, and wades into the ocean. It is, in some ways, a performance; he’s being photographed for this piece. Were there no camera, he probably wouldn't be doing this. But he's game.

The ocean is a steady dull roar. It fills your head; it erases everything. It's comforting. And in that void, I have Grim Reaper's "Come to Your Senses" running on a loop, with its cryptic hints of artistic failure ("Nope you won't / Ever make that one again") and its triumphant refrain, "It's inside the one and all."

I tell him this when he walks back up the sand. "I wrote that just over those cliffs," he says, "maybe a quarter mile away."

We eat at a nondescript place—Lennox and his wife's secret spot—and it’s one of the best meals I've ever eaten. Clams and shrimp and grilled sargo, or seabream, blackened around the edges, its flesh plump and flaky. Towards the end of lunch, Lennox thanks us for "coming all this way" to see him (though, honestly, that meal alone would have made it all worthwhile). "Thanks for putting up with me," he sort of mumbles.

Out of the blue, in response to a question no one asked, he says, "I haven't been everywhere, but Portugal's my favorite place I've ever been."

Before we drive back, we walk out onto the sand one more time. Way down the beach, fishermen are casting into the surf with enormous long poles, enveloped in a silvery glow; we discuss walking further, but Lennox points out that no matter how close we get, it will probably just look like where we are now. The mist is a trick of the air and the light. In reality, it's all around us already.